The World is a Playground ... Really!

 

WARNING: This post contains reference to male bovine excrement and a barely disguised F bomb. 

How can parents be assured that their children are safe on the school playground? They can’t, is the short answer. The potential hazards to an active child’s physical and/or psychological health are many, and so there can hardly be a “safe playground,” although there can be “safer playgrounds,” certainly.

               The way we normally deal with hazards is by reacting after an event in which injury or an obvious near miss presents. A man solicits a child on a playground and we build a chain link fence around it. Another child falls off the ladder on a slide and breaks an arm, so we order newer, safer slides. A playground is too small to accommodate all the classes without fights and bullying breaking out, so we stagger recess times and search out parent volunteers to boost supervision. All adults with access to children have to have criminal record checks, all must mask during epidemics, misbehaviour is punished and yet, if a child is to be protected 100% from all the dangers parents can imagine, what strategy short of keeping them at home, in bed, 24/7 is there?

               Mind you, there are helicopter parents who look out for their kids to the point where they themselves become hazardous to the child’s self-reliance-skills development, and there are others whose childcare amounts to little more than counting the children at bedtime to make sure no one is missing. When it comes to risk tolerance vs. intolerance, we’re all over the landscape so that a level of safety precautions assumed to be necessary by one parent is a ludicrous over-reaction to another.

               Our world is a playground; COVID-19 variations pose a hazard to everyone’s health; like a school administration seeks to protect children from exploitation, our governments are charged by us with doing what’s possible to protect us from illness or death at the hands of a virus sneaking around in our playground. Most of us will acquiesce to restrictions and precautions if they make sense to us; our wish to stay healthy and alive is a great motivator. But there will always be those who balk at safety measures, who will reconstruct the situation in their own minds to justify non-cooperation in vaccinations, mask wearing, limiting gatherings, etc. They will always be right in declaring that communities’ safety measures don’t make the playground safe anyway, and will justify non-cooperation that way. That will always be true, because lechers can find a way around a chain link fence, bullies can hide their nefarious acts from teachers, any child at any time can slip and fall.

               Point is, if a completely safe playground is impossible, is a safer playground worth the effort?  Must a vaccine protect 100% or be thrown out? If after installing better slides in the playground, a child still falls off the ladder and breaks a limb, is that proof that replacing the slides was a bullshit idea? And if a church insists that you wear a mask as a precaution against spreading COVID if you wish to participate in a service, does that contribute to safety, and does it rob anyone of a fundamental freedom?

               Children on a playground are not equally at risk. Some are amazingly attractive and therefor walk around with unearned cachet, while others feel homely as picket fences by comparison. Some are learning-gifted while others have a hard time with concepts. Some run really fast; others invariably come last. When we try to make playgrounds safer, do we have the gifted in mind, or the vulnerable? And when as a nation we enact measures to make the environment as health-safe as possible in time of pandemic, are we thinking about the robust population or the vulnerable minority? Or do we play one against the other?

               How we think about the right way to react to critical needs in a population that’s as various as ours turns out to be the big challenge. A man once said to me, “Why are they charging me a school tax when I no longer have any kids in school?” He didn’t say, “I happily pay the school tax because my community believes that every child benefits from a good education, and then we all benefit.” The balance between thinking of myself and mine as independent of my neighbours or nation, and visualizing emerging events as community challenges to which I owe a contribution, that’s really the only important question here …

               … unless, of course, I don’t—as they say—give a flying f**k unless it’s my kid that falls off the slide. When that level of selfishness becomes the norm, democracy and the communal spirit will be well on their way to extinction. A playground where a few teachers and a bunch of kids have formed a gang bent on undermining the principal's playground protocols ... well, you can finish this sentence. 

                

The See-saw Principle

 

The Quetzalcoatl, Gudalajara, Mexico

The Smith familyⁱ had been meeting in St. Onk’s Provincial Park near the village of St. Onk every July long weekend for a dozen years now, long enough for the gathering to qualify as a tradition. In 2023, a remarkable dry spring meant that the Province of Saskatchewan was forced to issue a “no-fire” prohibition for all provincial parks and the Smith family had to rethink the bonfire barbecue that had until now topped off their reunion.

They decided to go ahead with their plans, but when the final evening arrived, the opinion that since they were always careful with fire, and that the government had no business regulating what was a private and personal tradition, they were justified in having their bonfire barbecue. The most vocal purveyors of this opinion used the word “freedom” as the centrepiece of their argument.

Since this story hasn’t happened yet, I can’t end it. I imagine that frustrates you, my reader, who may be hoping that, a) the fire gets out of control, burns down 1,000 hectares of forest plus the village of St. Onk, thereby proving that community well-being trumps personal liberty, or b) that nothing untoward happens as a result of the fire, thereby proving the opposite.

Separating community responsibility and personal liberty into independent categories is a foolish mistake. The two are bound together like the ends of a teeter-totter. Absolute personal liberty is achieved only at the expense of the exercise of community responsibility. Being absolutely bound to only that which benefits community comes at the expense of personal liberty. The see-saw is never guaranteed to be at absolute equilibrium; from time to time and circumstance to circumstance, the position changes. In wartime, for instance, personal liberties are foregone in the interest of community survival. In times of peace and prosperity, individual liberties can expand in proportion to the well-being of the community.

There’s no doubt that current crises like the COVID-19 Pandemic or climate change have put their thumbs on the individual-liberties end of the see-saw. That a proportion of the population would resist the reduction in personal liberty is nothing new. During the World Wars, eligible men by their hundreds refused the call to do military (community) service, refused to give up that personal liberty falling under the rubric of religious freedom. The Trucker’s Freedom Convoy occupying Ottawa in January to February of 2022 was not much different from the conscientious objection in wartime; participants refused to be drafted into what the governments had declared to be a community war on the virus. In both examples, the “conscientious objectors” were dealt with relatively leniently in Canada (there were no forced vaccinations and war resisters had to pay with alternative labour). In both cases as well, the non-cooperators remained a minority and paid a price in lost esteem in the broad community, which sensed that the refusal to participate in a communal struggle meant the dissenters owed the community an unpaid debt.

I began with the thought-experiment of a bonfire episode during a hot, dry summer’s day. I’m sure others can dream up better examples to illustrate the see-saw connection between individual liberty and community responsibility. The long and the short of it, though, is that humanity has as its only home one single planet. If life is worth anything, then preserving it is too. As populations rise and resources shrink, we need to understand the see-saw principle well and learn to live with the rise and fall of individual liberty when the human community’s very survival is at stake.

iNames and places are fictional.